This is about far more than cars and canola

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“Trojan horses.”

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That’s shaping up to be the most useful way of describing several mostly overlooked elements of the “strategic partnership” Prime Minister Mark Carney entered into with Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. It wasn’t all about canola and cars.

While the public’s attention has been focused on its trade components, the new Canada-China concordat contains several core provisions that go far beyond the projected expansion of Chinese electric car imports in exchange for Beijing’s promise to ease tariff barriers on Canadian canola seed and meal and any other trade-related aspects of Canada’s “reset” with China.

“These are all Trojan horses,” Cheuk Kwan, co-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy and the spokesman for the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, told me this week. Edmund Leung, chair of the Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement (VSSDM), described the dozen or so non-trade deals as “very, very upsetting.”

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It’s as though Canadians are expected to simply forget all the national scandals over the past several years involving the efforts by Beijing’s United Front Work Department to monkeywrench the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberal party’s advantage and to unseat former Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole in 2022. It’s as though Ottawa has decided to be wholly oblivious to the voluminous evidence provided by Canada’s intelligence agencies documenting Beijing’s strongarming of Canada’s Chinese-language media into submission and obedience to Xi Jinping’s party line.

“It is very, very upsetting to me and to our organization,” Leung said. “This is all about expanding the Communist party’s influence and expanding their capabilities in Canada, in all those agreements, for transnational repression, political interference and disinformation.”

The proposed collaborations can be made to seem quite benign. They’re all about “people-to-people ties and cultural exchanges,” investment in museums, support for “digital content creators” and “visual artists,” heritage, education, “travel exchanges and cultural ties” and cooperation in the “creative industries” deep down into the “sub-national” level. But these are precisely the methods Beijing employs to extend the global reach of its “soft-power”........

© National Post